You’ve described yourself as a serial entrepreneur driven by one core question: What makes our brains truly happy? When and how did that question become personal for you?

There were 3 moments, at different times, and I only became aware of the first one years later.

The obvious first moment was when I met the first patient with depression. As a medical scientist, you just want to help. You can see in someone’s face that there is no light in this person, which I think is the most unfair disease you can have.

The second moment was when it hit me. In 2014, when my ex-wife and I separated. For the first time, I experienced insomnia, anxiety, and a certain level of depression. It changes the equation of life, because you have seen darkness.

When I was 15 or 16, I didn't trust anyone who told me what I should do, because I felt nobody had a clue. Their advice made sense only in their context. My grandparents grew up during the Second World War, so how could they guide someone born in 1973?

It all culminated one night. I adored a girl, and she simply told me she wasn’t interested. I was devastated, and I decided to spend a weekend in the mountains. Years later, I found a little piece of paper from that night. And it read, very clearly:

Rules for your life: stay away from women, stay away from money, stay away from drugs, stay healthy, and stay free.

The clarity of this is fascinating. Of course, it’s naive, and I failed on every single one of these in my life, but it doesn’t matter. When I found it 30 years later, I thought: I was much smarter at 16 than ever since. That reflection is also why I believe the biggest gap we have is that we don’t learn how the brain works at school. So apparently, I was on this journey my whole life.

When I really wrote it down, it was in 2014, when I realized I had been chasing the wrong equations in life for so long. I said I have to understand how happiness works for me, because I don’t have time to make another mistake.

If you think back to the earlier stages of your career, is there something you wish your younger self had known about success, meaning, or happiness?

You should always listen to and trust your feelings. Our feelings, our emotions, are the best compass you have, and it’s your compass. It’s great to learn from other people. But you don’t give a **** unless it matters to you.

I was following other people’s guidance, fully aware that my feelings were saying the opposite, and it led to years on the wrong trail.

People often assume scientists and entrepreneurs think very differently. Do they? How have you learned to combine both mindsets? Was there a learning curve for you?

I see myself as a medical scientist, someone who applies basic science to treat a disease. That was what I focused on for 30 years. So, if we compare a medical scientist and an entrepreneur, it’s striking how similar their thinking is.

Both strive to solve a problem, either for the patient or for the consumer. Then come up with a creative idea on how to solve it. Then you test your product or medication in a study or a test, using statistical methods in both worlds. If you think you can do market research in a consumer product without understanding statistics, you can, and you may be lucky, but you won’t actually have a proper readout of your market research.

There is one fundamental difference: the speed and the pressure the entrepreneur must embrace. As a scientist, you would never talk about a result without having the hard data and having run the data. As an entrepreneur, you are forced by the investors to give a prediction of the future because that's the basis on which the investment concept works. You invest based on potential future benefits and returns.

I feel I have solved this by being transparent about areas of uncertainty. That brings my investors and me into the same boat. I have to admit, I probably lost many investors with this approach, given how uncertain my business is. But on the other hand, our current investors are completely behind the uncertainty.

Early on, I was super lucky and grateful to meet people who saw much more in me than I saw in myself. They trained me, and they took risks on me. Later at Moderna, it was always investors saying: You have to jump into the cold water. It won’t get warmer in the future.

I don’t believe you can become an entrepreneur by studying theory. I have no MBA, but I learned much more by trying and failing a lot. But without people taking massive risks on me, I would have never been able to see what I see.

Matter Neuroscience aims to identify a universal biomarker for happiness. Could you explain in simple terms what that means and why it matters?

Let's take an example, many people understand. When diabetes was diagnosed as a clinical issue, the life expectancy of people was literally a couple of years after diagnosis. Your blood sugar was checked once in a while in a doctor’s office. When you could test your blood sugar level at home at any time, life expectancy improved by 10–15 years in the 70s. Finally, we had something people could see in real time, even though one cannot physically feel the difference between a blood sugar of 80 and one of 200.

Now, continuous glucose monitoring has put diabetic patients back on a normal lifespan, thanks to a precise biomarker - glucose levels. This is what Matter does. We give you a biomarker that makes your happiness measurable.

We need six biomarkers, because human happiness is more complex than a single measure. But once you can see those biomarkers, everything changes—your own biology becomes a compass, pointing the way forward.

So that's the whole idea. Something you can look at every day that gives you an indication that you are low in, say, oxytocin, so you'd better call your kids or your mother, because you need to fill that particular bucket of neurotransmitters to make that area of my brain healthy again.

You describe six neurotransmitters that shape different “flavors” of happiness. Which of these tends to surprise people the most?

Everybody has a certain focus area. What really surprised us, looking at all the brain scans, was how profoundly impactful contentment and amusement are. Whenever there was laughter in the memory, during the MRI, the entire brain lit up. So laughing is such an amazing trigger for our brain.

The second thing was contentment, for example, winning something does not have very bright patterns in brain activation. What was fascinating is that collaborative experiences like laughing together, hanging out, partying together, showed much more brain activity than winning alone at a tennis tournament.

The biggest question marks come from contentment. Neuroscientifically, it is very clearly defined as you being in peace with yourself, looking inward rather than outward. That’s why it works so well in nature and calm places when you're alone.

Another one that surprises people is sexual desire, because people mix up desire for sex, but the brain doesn’t. Desire is finding someone attractive, the feeling of wanting; sex is the consummation, the pleasure reward that temporarily shuts the desire down.

Were there any scientific breakthroughs that made Matter possible?

What Siemens did with the new 7 Tesla functional MRI machines was essential. We would not have found what we have found without that.

And the second piece is our collaboration with Professor Goebel at Maastricht. He’s a world leader in real-time fMRI neurofeedback—technology that lets you see brain activity as it happens and learn to influence it. His team’s exceptional machine-learning expertise allows them to extract meaning from enormous, complex MRI data sets. Without that capability, our work simply wouldn’t be possible.

Your research suggests that our happiest memories act as powerful anchors for long-term well-being. How can people practically use this insight in daily life?
That's what we offer everyone through the Matter Club. It's basically the first emotional fitness club. We don’t train muscles, we train brain areas. We provide the club members with the polls and courses you can follow to build certain strengths, like endurance, strength, balance, flexibility, agility, and speed. You can participate in these courses that are actually emotion training.

We love using a mix of AI and humans because it’s really helpful. And the big fun is that, like in a gym, you see the other teammates training. Because ultimately it’s all about positive emotions. Since the whole point is to generate positive emotions, the club exchanges become genuinely fun—everyone is there to create more joy.
A very tangible example: because the areas of all these emotions are in different spaces in the brain, we have seen that people who report themselves the happiest actually have balanced activity. They somehow use all these emotions and neurotransmitters. One course is trying to get users to curate, in a week, moments that trigger all six. And for more advanced courses, try to do this every day or every other day.

You have to identify the proper areas of your brain and without an fMRI, you can only identify them by your feelings. Then you have a course that trains this. And the beauty is that we can now track how many memories you make in each emotional spectrum. We ask how you feel, and we keep checking whether you actually feel better.

And finally: what is a good life for you?

This is obviously the toughest question, because I feel I've probably spent 40 years not living a good life—just taking detours, testing things out. But if I literally look at my memory bank, it’s actually three things.

One type of memory is always a blue swimming pool with nobody in it. I love swimming.

Then the most abundant memories I have are all with my kids. The element of unconditional love, in both directions, is the best that has been given to us.

And the last thing is very clearly having crazy parties in Berlin in the techno underground scene, with my partner.

I know exactly what I should do every day.

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